In the Transcaucasus, there are many places claimed to be the mooring place of Noah's Ark, or related folklore in circulation, among the more famous Nakhchivan.
In the early 2000s, Hong Kong-based Christian academic speaker Leung Yin-shing, after examining popular legends and satellite images circulating at the time, concluded that the ark finally came to rest at the top of Mount Ales on the border between Turkey and Armenia. In order to solve the mystery of the Ark, the Christian ministry Noah's Ark International has been planning to explore the Ark since the first Chinese explorer team first climbed the mountain in 2004, and in August 2006, a Kurdish explorer found an unidentified object, suspected to be a block of wood, in a cave on Mount Ales. He immediately contacted a familiar member of the Hong Kong Exploration Team and sent a sample to Hong Kong in September for scientific analysis. The Center for Applied Geoscience of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Hong Kong conducted petrographic analysis of the sample and identified it as a petrified wood structure.
On April 28, 2010, foreign media reported that Hong Kong and Turkish explorers said they had found the hull remains of the legendary Noah's Ark near Mount Aal in eastern Turkey, and that tests had found that the remains dated back 4,800 years, the period of Noah's Ark's existence as described in the Book of Genesis. But it was also questioned by Nicholas K. Purcell, a lecturer in ancient history at the University of Oxford in England. Purcell questioned, saying, "If Eurasia had been covered by a flood more than 3,000 meters deep in 2,800 B.C., how could Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, which had existed for centuries before that, have survived?" .
On May 1, 2010 a professor of religion named Randall Price claimed that the AV mission claimed the discovery in question was a forgery (thisisallreportedtobeafake). His email pointed out that the photos were all taken somewhere on the Black Sea, and that 10 Kurds told him in the summer of 2008 that they had been hired to move wooden beams from around the Black Sea to the caves of Mount Aal.